January 24, 2013

If a debate were held on the subject of women in combat between the ex-spouses James Cameron (director of Aliens and Terminator 2) and Kathryn Bigelow (director of K-19, The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty), who would be pro and who would be con?

Pretty much all of James Camerons tough women are set in sci fi dystopias battling killer aliens and robots.Meanwhile Ms Bigelows women like Jessica Chastain have great fortitude ,skill and determination -just not on the battlefield.

People overlook one of the pioneers of the butt kickingbabe genre-John Carpenter whose women in Assault on Precinct 13 joined in defending the station from hispanic gangs.Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween and that redheaded broad who saves the world in Prince of Darkness are both derivatives of the same principle.

The most recent avatar (heh) compatible with the post Kill Bill era of female badasses would be Natasha Henstridge in the flawed Ghosts of Mars(not Carpenters best but sill better than pretty all of Michael Bay's crap)

DVN: I'm not sure if Steve posted it, as this came late in the thread's life, but I entirely agree with you on the "war as social work" issue. I'm in favor of very, very few military engagements, but those should be Roman in their brutality. I wouldn't mind if our enemies groused that "they make a desert and call it peace."

Ya know what? I'm not willing to be cannon fodder so that someone watching from the sidelines can show off how pee-see they are. Anyone who votes for this should either be put in combat, or have their daughters/nieces/whatever automatically drafted.

Looking at her Wikipedia entry (usual warnings apply), it seems Bigelow travelled the art school path and her first short film presented an anti-(male) violence message (fairly typical for a left winger of the period):Bigelow's short "The Set-Up," is a 20-minute deconstruction of violence in film. The film portrays "two men fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over." Bigelow asked her actors to actually beat and bludgeon each other throughout the film’s all-night shoot.

There seems an element of irony to her work - an overt stance critical of masculine violence and yet the desire to depict it in a full blooded way and have two men (well, actors) cut loose on one another, combined with what sounds like a parody of academic, scholarly analysis. Presumably, years of enduring art school pseudo-intellectual Professors turned her against them. It reminds me in description of the 'Howard Cosell commentating on love making' scene in Woody Allen's Bananas (1971).

So perhaps like many women, Bigelow has imbibed the feminist-leftist critique of macho men while deep down admiring them and also coming to the viewpoint where left wing intellectuals are ridiculous figures by contrast.

She may regard violence as a male thing in the way many '70s/'80s feminists did. (The old 'if women ran the world there would be no war' saw which Indira Gandhi & Margaret Thatcher knocked holes in).

OTH: she directed Blue Steel (1989) featuring Jamie Curtis as a tough female cop. Amusingly, given her private life, the story depicts Ron Silver suffering a psychotic break after he witnesses Curtis in the line of duty shooting a supermarket robber dead and he becomes dangerously obsessed with this 'Dirty Harriet' and starts a relationship with her. A female version of Play misty for me (1971).

"Republican interest in cities during this period had more to do with signalling to suburbanites that it would not allow urban blight to spill over into their communities than with a real electoral strategy."

So, the rise of thesuburbs was a boon to the gop in the 50s-80s.

And re-rise of big cities was a boon to dems since the 90s.

I wonder what would have happened if cities like NY were left to rot. It would have served as a reminder of urban democratic rot. But under Clinton and Giuliani, policies revived and favored cities over suburbs by toughening law enforcement and dealing with blacks by shipping them to jail to the suburbs.

Success of cities made liberalism cool again. And since gays were among leading gentrifiers who drove out blacks, they became heroes and new darlings of liberalism. And gays could away with 'racism' since they were 'victims' too and could scream 'homophobia'. Gays were used as battering ram of gentrification.

US beat USSR because rise in high-tech, free enterprise, creativity, and innovation in America was something the USSR, stuck in old economy, couldn't compete with.

Libs are now winning cuz they run the cutting edge enterprises like google, facebook, apple, etc. GOP did support globalism and free trade, but it failed to understand two things. Rich folks don't wanna live on bread(or cake) alone. They wanna feel virtuous and show it off, and there's more opportunity for this as libs. Also, social liberalism failed in the late 60s due to rowdy radicalism, black crime, angry feminists, and flaming homos. But since the late 80s, gays got sober and clean, feminists accepted fun culture and dropped puritanicalism that made them look stalinist, blacks were brought under control, and 60s radicals became respectables via saul alinskyism.. Also, rise in cheap immigrant labor made it viable for growth of small businesses in big cities. So, social liberalism became cool and mainstream.GOP, in contrast, seemed single-mindedly focused on money(Wall Street) or old crusty values.

Before social liberalism cleaned up its act, many Americans were driven to the 'mainstream' right. But the 'mainstreamization' of social liberalism created a new image of 'normality'. PC alone would have seemed Orwellian. But PC mixed with hipsterism, coolness, and pleasure made PC cool too.

Floating in an out of the war on terror has been feminism as a justification. Protecting third world women from third world men. So Women in combat has a kind of coherence with that.

Who are the authority figures who raised the typical US front line soldier. His single mother or grandmother. His public school teacher. The various other social workers and educrats in the schools system. They all are either female or report to females. So it makes sense to have women, not doing the grunt work of combat but being the people in charge. Women will be particularly good a shaming and brow beating the boys into risking their lives, which is the essence of military leadership.

Also worth noting, like it or not, is the sorry state of American manhood. There is a reason why the US entered and lost so many wars, and it is not the gays/liberals/Wiccans/Blacks/Commies/you_name_it that did it. It was Christian and Jewish white males that screwed up over and over. So, being intentionally provocative, maybe the alternatives to heterosexual men are the best choice.

Hmm, Hollywood and Washington agree on women in combat. Isn’t that reassuring?

Lawrence Wright, the author of a much-praised new book on Scientology, spoke at the Local Lefty Bookstore last night. He explained how Scientology was basically invented in two cities, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, California. Great urban minds think alike.

GOP's economic victory over big unions and Soviet Union forced the left to (1) learn to stop hating and love free enterprise(or at least cut a deal with it as the goose that lays the golden egg) and (2) move into culture war(and not in crazy 60s anarchist manner but in sober 80s institutional manner).

Btw, was the alliance between big business and socially conservative masses just an accident of history? Rich folks prolly always wanted to be culturally freer and more intellectualish but were pushed into GOP camp because Democratic Party was so heavily dominated by high-taxers, unions, and communist sympathizers. But with the erosion of unions, death of communism, and lowering of taxes, the rich no longer needed the GOP for protection or counterweight against the Left. This is the great irony of history. Reagan and GOP did so much to lower taxes, take out unions--with free trade and amnesty of illegals--, and defeat communism, but the absence of such threats made the rich go over to the Dems.

Immigration was also a boon as it revived cities. While not all immigrants are productive, cities are still better off with browns than with blacks. Browns may not produce much but their occupy space that otherwise might be occupied by blacks. As for yellows, they do revive lots of small businesses. Big business depends on people to buy stuff like ipads and ipods, and etc. And most consumers are not very rich. Lots of consumers are middle class, lower middle class, working class, and etc.

where's the chorus of voices telling obama to stop worrying about social issues, and concentrate on stuff that matters like the economy, debt, and jobs. for instance, how about we get the price of 87 octane below 3.50 a gallon (in the dead of winter!) instead of worrying about stupid stuff that nobody cares about, like women in combat.

oh right. that's only for conservatives.

liberals steadily advance their agenda at every step, never worrying about anything else.

America tied in Korea, and lost Vietnam, because of the Cold War: don't provoke the Soviets into global nuclear war.

Since then we've had the problem that a DEMOCRACY does not like casualties. At all. That's nothing new, we had opposition and considerable to the Mexican War, the Civil War, the conflict after the Spanish American war in the Philippines, and so on. Voters don't like seeing dead relatives, or those who could be, and no political figure will tell the truth; if you want a Clinton-era prosperity you need Clinton era oil prices (around $17 a barrel back then) which demands military dominance of regional enemies in favor of high oil prices (Russia, Iran basically).

We don't "win wars" because we fight like most Democracies, or even Western Enlightenment Era monarchies: on the CHEAP.

Human nature has not changed that much. The great soldiers of WWII were not that different from today's men. Rather it is the price we are willing to pay. It took Pearl Harbor to mobilize the nation, prior to that peace at any price was the public sentiment.

Gays really haven't cleaned up the much at all. Instead, the ones who were always bourgeoise but in the closet came out. That's the clean days you are talking about. Andrew Sullivna advertises for bareback sex in gay newspapers. Also the clamoring is starting again to re-open the bathhouses. We've got ten years max before the next gay outbreak why do you think they've ratcheted up the fury on gay marriage. It's also why gay adoption isn't such a priority. The gays in leadership know that a good portion of those adoptions are gonna get turned into gay party favors and want to lock on their gains before that happens.

"America tied in Korea, and lost Vietnam, because of the Cold War: don't provoke the Soviets into global nuclear war."

Americans won in Korea. Their main objective was to contain communism and save the South. It did. MaCarthur lost because he wanted to take all of North Korea and maybe even move into China. Communists failed in Korea, and so US won. Also, the communist side lost a lot more people.

Communists won a pyrrhic victory in Vietnam. It led to Vietnam vs Cambodia. Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia but eventually had to pull out just like Americans pulled out of Indochina. Ironically, Vietnamese lost 60,000 in Cambodia, about the number US lost in Vietnam. And then, there was war between Vietnam and China. North Vietnamese victory led to crackup of Asian communist alliance. Soviets, to prop up Vietnam as a client state, wasted a lot of resources.. just when it was getting mired in its own Vietnam in Afghanistan.

It's about triumph of geeks. Geeks came up with supertechnology in combat, indeed to the point that US military is untouchable.

American military is technology so advanced that even an all-women military could beat every nation in the world.

Imagine: all US female military vs Iran. US would crush Iran. An all US female military will even crush an all-male Chinese military.

Japanese were small and runty but why did they conquer so much in the early stages of the Pacific War? They had lots of firepower. Why did fairy airy British fruiters conquer Africa full of muscular blacks? Because the fruity Brits had guns.

US has all sorts missiles, helicopters, tanks, cruisers, drones, computer-guided this and that and everything, and etc. It's really a geek war. Geeks are to war what computer nerds are to Hollywood with CGI and all that stuff.

Technology is the great equalizer. A woman can push a button just as easily as a man. And 'front line' aint what it used to be.

"Since then we've had the problem that a DEMOCRACY does not like casualties."

The thing with Vietnam was that US wasn't attacked by the North Vietnamese, and so Americans didn't feel personal about it. But it was different with the 'Japs'. And after 9/11, Americans were willing to pay whatever price to get even.

Tyrannies don't like casualties either. Soviet Union lost 20,000 in Afghanistan but had enough. Deng decided to attack Vietnam fast and furious and withdraw. It was a punitive strike. Deng feared getting mired over there.

OK, but I thought it unrealistic that the Reeves character would fall for a chick as masculine-looking as that female star. Was Bigelow telling us that athletic women can't be too pretty? Seems she's turned out to be right.

I'm a little annoyed with the assertion that women can't compete w/ men in combat roles not being backed up with details about relative strength. You may be on to something, as I have read in previous articles on iSteve, but you aren't proving it this time. Why?

Wasn't Signorney Weaver a buttkicking babe in Aliens? I don't get why Cameron & Bigelow would be on opposite sides of the debate.

Japanese were small and runty but why did they conquer so much in the early stages of the Pacific War? They had lots of firepower.

Actually the Chinese had plenty of guns too, the Japanese were better organized, more disciplined, better trained. They did have aircraft, some artillery and few tanks but it was they way they operated that gave them the edge.

To this day there is a tendency to see the German invasion of France in 1940 as a vast armored behemoth that just couldnt be stopped. But the French & Brits had as many planes that were equal to the Germans, more tanks, more soldiers, more artillery. Yet they were defeated.

Why did fairy airy British fruiters conquer Africa full of muscular blacks? Because the fruity Brits had guns.

Purhleese. What planet are on? You think Victorian Brits were a bunch of fags? They were hard as nails and they had guns.

You think technology wins wars alone? That's what Clinton was saying before he had to send ground troops into Serbia after the "stealth" fighter got shot down by a clever SAM battery tech.

Sorry, but America's greatest advantages are the two oceans separating her from Europe and Asia. In conflict on the soil of the USA, such as a civil war, glorifying technology sounds like the typical neocon/liberal wet dream.

Rely on drones to fight your war, and you're going to end up with a lot of pictures of crucified drone pilots outside their boxes on RT/AJ when the enemy infantry came knocking pour encourager les outres.

"Sorry, but America's greatest advantages are the two oceans separating her from Europe and Asia."

If so, why were Indians helpless before whites? Why were Japanese helpless before Americans? Whites conquered America, and then Americans bashed Japan.

America is separated by oceans from the middle east, but America invaded Iraq.

So, this stuff about America 'protected by oceans' is hooey. If so, rest of the world would be protected from America too. But they are not.

America was lucky because one people, the Anglos, gained dominance over it. If French had played it smarter, they could have kept Canada, and North American history would have been Anglo vs Franco power.

If Chinese and Japanese had waken up earlier, they could have colonized America from the West Coast. If Spanish-Americans had been smarter and more energetic, they could have kept the NW territories or even expanded into Anglo-American territories.

But America lucked out that Asians were inward-looking(and didn't colonize the West Coast) and Anglo-Brits gained dominance in the seas, and thus unwittingly protected America from other naval powers.

Seas don't protect anyone. After all, China was connected to India and Russia, but its biggest threat came from the Brits who came by sea.

Anonydroid at 2:09 pm said: Why did fairy airy British fruiters conquer Africa full of muscular blacks? Because the fruity Brits had guns.

Hunsdon said: I was wrong. YOU, sir, win the Whiskey award. While, admittedly, Africa was kind of late in the game, Britain became Great at the point of a bayonet, mounted on a musket accurate to maybe 50 yards point fire. The Brits of yesteryear----way back in the misty reaches of time, back in the 17th-19th century, weren't effeminate fops. They were killin' gents, if they were gents at all.

Of his Peninsular Army, Wellesely said, "I do not know if they frighten the enemy, but they terrify me."

In Africa, for that matter, against Shaka, the Brits were using a single shot black powder cartridge rifle with brass cases that would stick (much like at Greasy Grass). Even in Africa: lots of bayonet work, which is basically formation spear fighting, which has been essentially the same since the hoplites.

Not only is women in combat a bad idea, women in military units in general is a bad idea.

Creates a lot of dynamics, sexual tension that is detrimental to unit cohesion.

But as others have noted, the U.S. military currently has such an overwhelming advantage strategically and technologically, we can afford to indulge a bad ideal like letting Jill and Susie dress up as sailors and grunts because it makes some significant constituency feel good about themselves.

Despite the sort of ongoing banana wars we have now, we have much more of a peacetime military than a wartime one. Colonial actions, that sort of thing, like Britain before WWI.

There is a long history of peacetime militaries having to rapidly clean up a lot of accumulated cruft when general warfare breaks out.

For example, the Red Army in WWII, after the German invasion, did away with commissars holding dual command, reinstated officer shoulder boards (a hated symbol of bourgeoisie...), and even unpurged a lot of commanders that had been considered politically suspect but were still alive.

On a lesser scale, the USN had to have a purge of all its Pacific submarine commanders in the early part of WWII. The sub force was pretty ineffective at first - some of this was due to torpedo issues, but a lot was also due to a class of commanders who had come up in peacetime operating under the overriding principle of "don't ever risk the ship", which is something you have to do in wartime. Following this, the Pacific sub fleet became devastatingly effective..

Lots of other examples of peacetime policies & commanders falling by the wayside when warfare breaks out.

It will happen in this case as well. I've been a USMC grunt and STA scout/sniper. Most guys can't do this work & I'd be surprised if there are more than a handful, if any, women in the entire world that could perform in such capacity w/out some serious compromises, much less just having the lethal mentality.

Why did fairy airy British fruiters conquer Africa full of muscular blacks? Because the fruity Brits had guns.

Purhleese. What planet are on? You think Victorian Brits were a bunch of fags? They were hard as nails and they had guns."

I was always amazed at how people mistake effete mannerisms in polite society for lack of ability in the battlefied.

The Brits were and remain a tough people.Their boxers are some of the best in the world.The SAS qualitatively is probably better than the US Special forces and the Israeli Sayerat Matkal.

Their success at conquering the world was a combination of strength,luck,strategy ,demography and sheer force of will.

It may seem odd to the present day sterile western world but the British didnt populate entire continents by subscribing to modern feminist dictums but British and British origin used to pump out babies at a rate that wouldve alarmed even todays Muslims!

Of course the morally ambiguous divide et impera was behind much ofBritish imperialism, it was successful while it lasted..less so for the countries which became independent...Cyprus,Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan/Bangladesh ,Sri Lanka/LTTE

DVN: I'm not sure if Steve posted it, as this came late in the thread's life, but I entirely agree with you on the "war as social work" issue. I'm in favor of very, very few military engagements, but those should be Roman in their brutality. I wouldn't mind if our enemies groused that "they make a desert and call it peace."

I actually did see that comment but I dont remember if I responded to it .Anyway I agree.Wars should be rare and devastating to the enemy.What many "violence begets violence" type liberals dont realize is that "carthago delenda est" type tactics prevent more wars than they ever will be able to prevent with their pacifism.

I personally would like an end to the hypocrisy with regard to civilians in combat.Civilians ARE a legitimate target in war. Dresden,Hamburg,Hiroshima ,Nagasaki- how many Brits or Americans today lose sleep over what transpired then ? And why should they, civilians are part of the war machine.And yes by this logic ,as loathesome as it was - the 3000 dead in 9/11 were legitimate targets.The question one has to ask one self is not whether it was right or wrong-but whose side are you one and how would you make them pay so that they dont it to you again.To clarify ,I cant condemn death of civilians on 9/11 as being against the "rules of war" but as I am on the side of the Americans ,I want the organizers and supporters of those attacks dead and may their Carthago be delenda! civilians and all.

blondie said: I'm a little annoyed with the assertion that women can't compete w/ men in combat roles not being backed up with details about relative strength.

Hunsdon replied: It is almost invariably the case that the party arguing for a radical shift in the existing order must provide compelling evidence that the shift would be beneficial, or at least not detrimental.

Oddly enough I am having trouble running down an online copy of the 1992 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Force's report, which set forth the strength disparities between men and women in the military. However, if you can find it, the figures you seek are there.

"Sorry, but America's greatest advantages are the two oceans separating her from Europe and Asia."

If so, why were Indians helpless before whites? Why were Japanese helpless before Americans? Whites conquered America, and then Americans bashed Japan.

First of all, "Indians" is a conceptual catch-all that held no meaning for the people it refers to. There were Indian tribes, and they were at each other's throats before and during their wars with the Whites. Second, they weren't helpless before Whites, at all. In fact, the warlike tribes with which Whites fought often terrorized White populations.

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